Search

I’m always worrying about something. If the lid on a medicine bottle comes off too easily after just purchasing it, I’m convinced someone has tampered with it. If my shower curtain is slightly askew, there’s obviously a murderer behind it. Don’t get me started on how I panic after the lights go off during a blackout.

Some fears are normal. If you’re traveling at high speeds in a car, it’s reasonable to be afraid that you’ll spin out of control and injure yourself. It’s not reasonable to believe that the neighbor kid is actually a small Russian spy, and the laser pen he’s playing with is actually a high-tech death laser.

Here are my Top 5 most irrational fears as voted by me…and my therapist…and everyone else.

I’ll disappear, and someone I know will be wrongly accused.

I blame this on my telecommuting job, and how it allows me to keep crime shows playing in the background all day long. Do you have any idea how morbid the A&E network is? I DO. I think a lot about how my roommate would be the first suspect if I went missing because we live together, and he’s the person I spend the most time with him. I spend a lot of energy avoiding death when I think people I know, especially him, don’t have alibis.

Something will come crashing through my window and crush me to death.

Getting crushed to death seems like a pretty bogus way to die. You’re just sitting there watching a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion special (god, I love those reunion specials) and suddenly a tree/car/meteor/Indiana Jones-type boulder will flatten you like a pancake. I don’t want the headline in a newspaper to read, “Police stumped and trying to get to the root of the problem after tree put the axe on girl’s life.”

If I kill a spider, other spiders will find out and stage an uprising.

Poisonous spiders are no joke. We have hobo spiders here in Oregon, and while I don’t believe they’ll kill you, their bites can leave you with such bad necrotic lesions that you wish you had died. When I see any kind of spider in my house, I get a cup and piece of paper, catch it, and release it back into the wild. While I’m walking it outside, I ask it to spread word of my benevolence to other spiders. I feel like I’ve set such a precedent that if I didn’t uphold my end of the deal, word would spread quickly, and I’d find myself on the receiving end of hobo spider wrath.

I’ll have a meltdown during a flight, and have to be sedated by the air marshal.

I am not afraid of flying in the traditional sense. I love takeoff, and I love guessing how good/bad the landing will be. I don’t worry about crashing, or potential terrorist plots. What I’m concerned about is myself. What if, for no reason whatsoever, I start sweating…and then crying…and then vomit everywhere…and then have a full blown freakout while I’m at cruising altitude? I’ve never come close to this happening, but the moment I buckle my seat belt, I can feel anxiety beginning to build over my nonexistent mental breakdown.

I’ll stumble upon a crime committed by the mob, and will be forced to go into Witness Protection.

One day I’ll get a hankering for Totino’s Pizza Rolls. On my way to the grocery store my car will break down, and I’ll be forced to pull over where I am. While calling a tow truck, I’ll witness two mobsters tie cement blocks to someone’s feet and throw them into the ocean. The police will tell me I’ll need to go into Witness Protection because someone named Johnny No Neck wants me dead. I don’t have an amazing life, but it’s my life, and I’d like to keep living it.

Please tell me I’m not some whack job alone on What-The-Hell-Is-Wrong-With-You Island. I can’t be the only one. What are some of your most irrational fears?

I suppose my fear of accidentally creating a chemical vapor that kills me immediately would be one. And the one about the phantom cats finding me and eating me in my sleep. And the one about falling into a snake pit. And I share the being-crushed phobia. But irrational? I don’t know. They seem plausible to me. 🙂

In Deliverance, three corporate dudes and their guide canoeing down a back-water river in Georgia stumbled across a moonshine still. Things didn’t work out so good for them. So maybe that last one isn’t so nuts after all.

I hope one day to be subdued by a Marshall. I worry that ANY bridge will suddenly collapse when I’m on it and/or that the sun will suddenly SUPERNOVA and we’re history or what if the earth’s gravitational pull that the sun has on us suddenly disappears and we zoom into space then explode? What if I can’t find left handed scissors?